


No Place for a Hero

by AthenasAspis (agentandromeda)



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, This Does Not End Happily, helios station, jack's transformation into handsome jack, set during the pre sequel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 07:11:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15967295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentandromeda/pseuds/AthenasAspis
Summary: Part of what Rhys loved about Jack was how much he'd sacrifice for the greater good. Part of what Jack loved about Rhys was how he kept him from sacrificing too much.-OR-AU where Rhys is Jack's boyfriend during the events of the Pre-Sequel, and stays with him through his descent into darkness.





	1. Welcome to Helios

**Author's Note:**

> I usually don't write rhack but i couldn't get this idea out of my head  
> enjoy

Without Rhys’s new arm, the Vault Hunters wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Even with the prosthetic and implants allowing him to hack with a thought, fingers moving across the terminal with blinding speed, the hanger door only opened fully a split second before the rocket came screaming through it.

“Shit!” Rhys yelled, springing back. It was too late; the rocket didn’t hit him directly, but a metal panel slammed into him, launching him back across the floor and into the metal railing. Rhys gave a little “oof!” as the impact drove the wind out of him. He gasped desperately for air, patting his hand weakly against his chest.

He finally sat up to see a disparate menagerie of five people—and one robot—strewn across the metal floor where they had landed after being flung out of the passenger capsule. Rhys pushed himself to his feet, wincing as his ribs screamed in protest.

The Vault Hunters were also attempting to recover, slowly pushing themselves to their feet. Their 100% survival rate was nothing short of miraculous. The first to rise was Athena. Rhys approached the intimidating gladiator with some trepidation. Sure, he was dating her employer, but all those videos he’d seen of her and her sword in action had left him rather nervous.

“Hi,” he addressed the assembled Vault Hunters. “I’m Rhys. You probably already know that. And I know who you are. Uh, so we were going to go after the Vault on Elpis, but as you can see, things have sort of….gone south.” Wilhelm was helping the body double up off the ground. That made all of them on their feet.

“Anyway,” Rhys continued, “we’re just going to make our way back to Jack. He’ll know what to do. And, ah…you’ll probably have to fight your way through some DAHL soldiers. But from what I’ve seen, that kind of seems like your thing.”

“Lead the way,” Athena told him, already firmly established as the leader of the group. 

Rhys drew his stun baton and ran for the door, motioning the Vault Hunters to follow.

=================

They fought their way back to the hanger control deck fairly quickly. Rhys didn’t even have to use his weapon. The Vault Hunters were no well oiled machine—they were clearly somewhat uncomfortable around each other—but their individual badassery more than made up for it.

“This is it,” he announced, striding across the room to the door. 

“Oh hey, are these the Vault Hunters I hired?” Jack’s voice crackled in over the ECHO. 

“Athena, reporting for duty,” Athena replied.

“Awesome! Hey, sorry about the whole DAHL thing, we really didn’t—son of a TAINT!” Rhys heard gunshots in the background, and the connection clicked off.

“Jack?” he anxiously yelled into the device. “Jack, come in!” 

With a wave of his hand, he accessed the door controls, but before he could open the door, it burst open with a spray of laser fire.

Rhys rolled behind a stack of crates just in time to avoid a laser blast that instead nicked the corner of his vest. He peeked his head around the corner to see Athena and Wilhelm make short work of the soldiers. The body double took one look at the blood strewn across the floor and turned a little green. Rhys could sympathize. He hadn’t expected to get so up close and personal with blood for this: the Vault Hunters were supposed to be the ones doing all the dirty work. But invasive cybernetic surgery left gore seeming a little more tame.

“Come on!” Athena yelled, and the group followed her into the room. There, Rhys’s eyes landed on Jack as DAHL soldiers swarmed him. Before Rhys could even yell “Get away from him!” a soldier landed a punch on Jack’s cheek that forced spatters of blood out of his mouth, and Jack crumpled to the ground.

“Bastards!” Rhys cried, brandishing his stun baton and rushing at the soldiers with reckless abandon. The soldiers turned their guns at him, but Athena rushed ahead of him with her shield held high. 

“Stay back, Rhys,” Athena told him.

“B-but, Jack,” Rhys sputtered. Athena shoved him aside and hurled her shield at the soldiers, where it ricocheted, knocking five of them back. 

“I’ll save your boyfriend,” she growled. “Get out of my way.”

Rhys scowled and hunkered down behind a stack of ammo crates. He began frantically searching through them for a health vial. Finally he found one. He peeked around the corner of his little fortress of boxes and saw the Vault Hunters spread out across the fringes of the room fighting the soldiers, who had left Jack alone. Rhys ran to him. Jack was in bad shape. He wheezed with every breath as he clutched his ribs, and his nose and mouth were both bleeding.

“I’ve got a vial,” Rhys panted. “You’re going to be okay.”

“Stick it in me,” Jack said with a dumb grin. 

“Does everything have to be an innuendo with you?” Rhys demanded, but he couldn’t help his smile. He took the vial and injected it into Jack’s proffered arm.

“Oh, that feels much better,” Jack breathed. He pushed himself to his feet and looked back at Rhys with that smirk that melted Rhys’s heart. “Now let’s take back this station.”


	2. Lost Legion Invasion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They need a way off the station. They find one. But it comes at a price.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was going to be a oneshot to get an idea out of my head. It just reached 4k. What am I doing. i don't even ship this

“Escape pods are this way!” Jack yelled, gesturing for the Vault Hunters to follow him. 

They encountered no Lost Legion soldiers on the way to the main escape jet bay. While they waited for a particularly tricky door to open, Rhys made a call.

“Vaughn,” he said without preamble as the connection went through. “Are you okay?” He winced at the sound of a very close gunshot on the other end.

“Rhys!” Vaughn exclaimed. “Thank God! We heard they were going for Jack first.” Rhys frowned at this news. While Jack was fairly up in the Helios hierarchy, being the reason the whole station even existed, he was by no means the most senior Hyperion official on the station. Vaughn continued, “We’re establishing a foothold in the Marketing division. We’ve established control of the airlocks, and we’ve been….well, we’ve sort of been venting them…into space.” He gave a nervous laugh. “But we’ve got a 70% survival rate, so…”

The door finally opened, and the crew walked cautiously into the next hallway.

“Is Yvette with you?” Rhys asked anxiously. 

“No, her and some of the less…gun-gifted employees went to the far end of the Requisitions division. The Lost Legion isn’t touching it.” 

“Great. Listen, I need you to—“ his connection to Vaughn was cut off by a senior-status communication. The name Harold Tassiter scrolled across his vision.

“John, what the hell is going on down there?” Tassiter demanded. 

“Oh, hello, Tassiter,” Rhys sighed. “Finally deigned to speak to us mortals?”

“Rhys,” Tassiter growled. “How goes it, knowing you slept your way to your current position?”

“You’re just jealous ‘cuz no one would ever date a man with that mustache,” Rhys sneered.

“Introductions aside,” Tassiter drawled, “I’m getting reports of alarms all across Helios, and one of you two incompetents had better tell me why that is.”

“Uh, nothing, sir,” Jack interjected quickly. “One of the Claptraps tried to, uh, french kiss a light socket, sir.”

“Can’t blame them,” Rhys snickered, switching his ECHO off so his boss couldn’t hear. “Better that than Tassiter’s pedo-stache.”

The double watched this exchange with an expression that landed somewhere between anxiety and horror.

“Um,” he asked in a voice that was functionally identical to Jack’s and yet totally different, “has your boss actually approved this mission?”

“You gotta think bigger than that, other-me,” Jack said, walking backward with his arms spread wide. “We pull this off, we won’t have a boss to answer to.”

“Because he’ll fire us?” the double asked.

“No, because I’ll be the boss. I’m going to be the king of Hyperion—and that’ll make you the king of Hyperion, too. By extension. I mean, you’re not gonna like, actually do anything, but you’re gonna make a buttload of money.”

“What does that make me?” Rhys asked good-naturedly. 

He knew the real answer; many late nights had been spent discussing the wild ways in which Rhys could use his almost-limitless power and money once they ran the most powerful corporation in the six galaxies. 

“Royal concubine,” Jack said with a flippant wave of his hand, and Rhys laughed. Athena cleared her throat.

As they ran towards the door to the escape pod deck, a notification flashed across Rhys’s vision.

EMERGENCY IN ESCAPE SHIP BAY 25-E, it said. Rhys opened up the incident report feed. 

“Wait!” he called. They all stopped and looked at him. Rhys quickly shuffled through the little footage he was able to get through the Lost Legion firewall.

“We need to find another way,” he told them. “They’re…they’re destroying the escape pods.”

“Why would they do that?” the double asked. “There’s no one dangerous on there. Just workers.”

“We don’t even have a real military,” Jack sighed. “These soldiers are just killing innocent people.” He drew himself up to his full height, and a steely glint entered his eye as he addressed the Vault Hunters.

“This is what we’re fighting against. An army that doesn’t care if the people they shoot are firing back or not. We have to take them all out before more people die. You can’t show them any mercy. For every soldier you let live, dozens of civilians may die. Remember that down there.”

“Down there?” the cowgirl, Nisha, asked. “Thought the Lost Legion destroyed our only way off this station.”

Rhys wondered where the hell Jack had found these people. Rhys and his data-mining capabilities certainly had had nothing to do with it. 

Jack gave Nisha a conspiratorial grin.

“I’ve got a crazy idea,” he said.

==========

Several spent shield charges later, and Rhys, Jack, and the Vault Hunters were safe in the Moonshot Control Center. 

“This place is simply ghastly,” Aurelia said with a sneer and a dismissive flick of her wrist. “Yellow is a horrid color.”

“Well,” Jack told her as he fiddled with the console, “with any luck, you won’t be here much longer.”

“Ammo machine and med vendor over here,” Wilhelm called out.

“Yeah, you should probably stock up. Who knows when the next supply opportunity will be down there,” Jack said.

The double sighed and kicked his heels against the crate he was sitting on while Nisha applied a small bandage to his cheek.

“I require a specialized repair kit in order to heal,” the Claptrap unit input from across the room. “Supply me with one of those, and I’m good to go!”

Thankfully, he did not start dancing. Rhys’s tweaks to the Fragtrap code had managed to suppress his more annoying aspects. Jack was a brilliant coder, but he didn’t seem to have the knack for anything involving artificial intelligence. That was Rhys’s department. 

Suddenly, a spray of gunfire echoed through the room as a soldier ran in from a side entrance, firing wildly and yelling “the greed of Hyperion shall not go unpunished!”

“Kill that asshole!” Jack commanded. 

Before Rhys could even duck for cover, Aurelia had dispatched the soldier with a clean headshot. The double let out a low whistle of astonishment. Rhys gave everyone a quick once-over. No one seemed hurt. 

“Aw, fer—“ Jack growled, “The moonshot auto controls are damaged! Rhys, can you help me out here?”

Rhys trotted over to his side. The problem was immediately apparent. The autoshot interface was marred by one large bullet hole that exposed the wires underneath. The wires were clearly a lost cause; they were torn and tangled and emitted dangerous-looking sparks. Rhys ran a quick diagnostic with his arm, the results of which he met with a dejected sigh.

“Fixing this would take a specialized part that would take weeks to ship,” he told Jack quietly. “Is there any other way?”

“We’ll have to launch the controls manually,” Jack replied. “Someone’s gonna have to stay back and do it. I’d suggest one of the Vault Hunters, but,” he glanced back at Athena, who was polishing her shield, “we’ll need them to disable the signal on Elpis.”

Rhys let out a breath through his teeth. As far as combat went, he was the most inept. And with his implants, he was also the most suited to breaking whatever control the Lost Legion had over the station. With his stun baton and his coding skills, he would have a chance.

“Maybe we could get one of the workers in here,” Rhys began. Jack waved his suggestion away.

“Nope, not putting them in any more danger. I’ll stay behind and launch the cannon.”

Rhys folded his arms. Of course that would be Jack’s first instinct. He was truly a hero, even amid the cutthroat corporate atmosphere of Hyperion. It was hard to remain focused on the greater good anywhere near Pandora. But Jack had managed it. The world had too little heroes. Rhys wasn’t about to let it lose another one.

“I’m not letting you get yourself killed,” he told Jack. Jack flashed him a confident smile, but there was a twinge of fear behind his eyes.

“I’m a hero, baby,” he said as he prepped the moonshot container. “Self sacrifice is part of the job.”

“Alright,” Rhys said. “But you’ll need someone who can interface with Helios tech.”

Jack shook his head.

“Nope. No. Uh-uh. You’re staying in Concordia until Helios is safe.”

“You’re not my boss,” Rhys told him. “You’re my boyfriend. Which means you’re gonna let me help you.”

“Okay,” Athena announced. “We need to get moving. Rhys and Jack, your sacrifice will not be in vain. If you die.”

“What happens to me if Jack dies?” the double whispered to Nisha. She shrugged.

“Nothing stopping you from taking his place,” she whispered back.

“You two can plot your coup later,” Rhys told them. “Get in the cannon.”

Rhys and Jack launched the moonshot just in time. As it sped away from Helios, several fighters appeared in the open window of the control center. Soldiers approached from every door. Rhys drew his stun baton and Jack readied his wrist lasers.

“Showtime, baby!” Jack laughed. “Let’s show these Lost Legion bastards why you don’t mess with us on our turf.”

Rhys was already preparing an exit. 

“Maintenance hatch in the corner,” he hissed. “Follow me on my mark.”

He waited until the Lost Legion had assembled themselves before calling “now!” and dragging Jack along by the wrist. They reached the hatch just as the telltale sound of a grenade clicked across the floor towards them. Jack held up the door of the hatch as a shield as Rhys climbed down into the maintenance tunnels. In the smoke and shrapnel of the explosion, Jack hurled the trapdoor aside and jumped down into the guts of Helios. Rhys ushered him through a thick steel door with a manual lock. He slammed the door behind him, turning the wheel to lock it securely against the soldiers.

“This should buy us some time,” Rhys panted.

“Alright!” Jack cheered. “Score one for team Hyperion!”

Rhys leaned against the door and slid to the ground. Finally. They’d made it.

Well, not really. The station still crawled with soldiers, and Hyperion’s only hopes might have died on impact.


End file.
